David Meads, Vice President, Middle East and Africa, Cisco, says Cisco’s latest suite of Assurance products will help customers achieve a higher level of automation

Over the past few years, the explosion of devices, adoption of cloud and exponential growth of security threats have challenged current approaches for building and managing networks.

Cisco’s vision is to create a network that anticipates operational issues, stops security threats in their tracks, and continues to learn, adapt and protect.

To realise this, Cisco is driving the intent-based networking revolution by transforming the entire network, from the data centre and campus, to the branch and edge.

Cisco is introducing its second wave of intent-based networking innovation, with powerful assurance products spanning the networking portfolio.

In the data centre, the Cisco Network Assurance Engine uses continuous verification of the entire network to help keep business running as intended, even as the network changes dynamically.

In campus and branch networks, Cisco DNA Center Assurance is delivering a new level of insight and visibility to dramatically reduce the time and money IT spends troubleshooting across wired and wireless environments.

And for customers with distributed IT operations, the new Cisco Meraki Wireless Health reduces mean time to remediate wireless issues with rich analytics and insights.

“The network has never been more critical to business success,” said David Goeckeler, executive vice president, Networking and Security Business at Cisco. “We’re reinventing the network ground up to deliver a secure and intelligent platform for digital business. We are taking another major step toward that ambitious goal with intent-based networking innovations designed to deliver contextual insights and assurance that will help transform IT from reactive to proactive.”

Cisco’s intent-based networking portfolio represents a fundamental shift away from the manual and time-intensive methods by which networks are traditionally managed. These intent-based networks capture and translate business intent into network policies and activate them across the infrastructure. With the introduction of assurance capabilities, they can now continuously verify the network is operating as intended.

Customers globally are embracing intent-based networking. Nearly 200 customers are in early field trials with the new assurance technologies. More than 1,100 customers are deploying the recently announced Catalyst 9000 Series switches, with 150 running DNA Center pilots. In the data centre, Cisco has more than 14,500 Nexus 9000 customers, with a 45% ACI attach rate.

“Regional businesses are having to cope with increased technological complexity, lower budgets and the onslaught of increased security threats and at the same time continuously transforming their IT infrastructure into an agile and scalable one,” said David Meads, Vice President, Middle East and Africa, Cisco.

“With corporate margins under pressure, network management together with proactive and timely attention to network bottlenecks is non-negotiable for organisations that are digitally transforming. Cisco’s latest suite of Assurance products will help our customers achieve a higher level of automation with increased certainty, allowing them to confidently move at a faster pace without compromising security policies.”

Innovation Spanning Data Centre and Enterprise Networking

Cisco is introducing three powerful new assurance products that further demonstrate how intent-based networking systems move at the speed of digital business.

In the data centre network, Cisco is enabling always-on assurance through the Cisco Network Assurance Engine. By combining mathematically accurate models of the network with more than 30 years of codified domain knowledge, Cisco provides IT teams the ability to instantly pinpoint why and when the network is not acting as intended, then offer suggestions on how to address the issue.

This comprehensive view into their network helps enable IT teams to:

Predict the Impact of Changes: Make changes to the network faster and with more confidence, catching human configuration errors before they cause problems

Continuously Verify Network Behaviour: Proactively eliminate network outages and vulnerabilities by continuously analysing the state of the entire network

Assure Security Policy and Compliance: Reduce risk by assuring that security policies are being applied consistently across the network and ensure policies are compliant with business requirements – every minute of every day

With ACI and Tetration, Cisco provides the ability to translate application intent and activate those policies across the network. Now, with the Network Assurance Engine, Cisco is delivering the final element of intent-based networking – the assurance of intent.

In the campus and branch, Cisco is enabling ‘everything as a sensor’ and aggregating intelligence from the network, application, client and things to help provide IT with full context. These capabilities will dramatically reduce the 43% of time that IT spends troubleshooting and improve the experience for employees and customers.

Cisco DNA Center Assurance provides a 360-degree contextual view that connects all the relationships of who, what, where, when and how. Spanning wired and wireless environments, it delivers a complete picture of what is happening between users and applications with real-time, historical and predictive capabilities. DNA Center Assurance helps IT teams address three major issues:

Powered by network analytics and rich contextual data, Cisco Services offers new services to help customers streamline the deployment of the new assurance solutions. From advisory and implementation, through optimisation and managed services, Cisco and its partners are helping customers accelerate their journey to truly intent-based networks.

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Intelligent CIO Middle East is a technology intelligence platform aimed at the enterprise IT sector to provide targeted updates and research driven data. As part of Lynchpin Media, this digital medium gives unparalleled advice to the regional community